While working on this second special issue on family methodology
with Lucy Bailey, I had a remarkable opportunity to offer my Life
History Research Methods and Applications course to our Urban Indigenous
Education cohort of master's students. This opportunity arose when
the director of this special program, my colleague, Susan Dion, had a
hunch that I and my course might be a "good fit" for this
cohort. I have offered this course for more than a decade at York
University to a range of students. I spent some time reading literature
on indigenous methodologies and changed some of the readings in the
course as a result. For example, we read from Margaret Kovach's
work on Indigenous methodology (2), Leanne Leddy's work on oral
history research in a community steeped in oral tradition (3) and
Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland's work on decolonizing oral
history research (4).

The course assignments revolved around some "in-class"
activities for which students negotiated topics to interview each other
about. The first one was loosely framed as "where were you
when?" The second topic summoned students to interview each other
about "a family story". The third topic asked students to
write about a personal memory / story and then share it with their
partner. The partners were then to interrogate the stories, looking for
the traces of the cultural, social, familial, ideological, historical,
and political, etc.

These activities were followed up with a presentation wherein each
student took one of the in-class activities and developed it further. In
the presentations, every single student revisited a family story or a
family relationship. Their insights into the challenges and
possibilities in hearing and then sharing family stories were
astounding. Without framing it as such, we wound up having an amazing
discussion about family methodology--as it intersects with tenets of
Indigenous research methodology, Indigenous oral tradition and the long
shadow on Indigenous families of the residential school system and the
'sixties' scoop (5). Some of the things I learned echoed
strongly with the articles that appear in this issue.

Both "life history research" and "oral
history", were reframed by the Indigenous cohort as
"respectful story telling", "oral tradition",
"indigenous research"--and all were steeped in notions of
family. The students wondered about the prevalence of what they called
"extractive research" in the academy and the pervasive
assumption that everyone had access to their own family stories. Those
who had family stories and access to them experienced a newfound
privilege when they learned that some of their peers had neither.
Prompts like "ancestors", "tradition", "blood
memory" (6), "Truth and Reconciliation", "cultural
knowledge", "heritage", "residential
schooling", and "the 'sixties' scoop" summoned
stories about "family", a term that was constantly contested
and negotiated throughout the course. "Family" meant one thing
to someone raised in an Indigenous community, another to someone whose
elders had been schooled in Canada's nefarious residential school
system, and yet something else to someone whose parent had been adopted
during the 1960s.

Alongside the stories they shared were questions about
"honouring", "gatekeeping", "protecting"
"passing on", "knowing and not knowing",
"sharing", and "responsibility to the story": all
the ethical issues associated with storying lives for research purposes.
They were particularly concerned about researcher-researched
relationships, and oftentimes highlighted their dual roles as
researchers AND family members.

In this second issue on family methodology we continue our
engagement with the question: "What might it mean, in terms of
methodology, to consider family and family stories?" The articles
herein echo many of the issues raised by the Indigenous cohort: knowing
and not knowing family secrets, gatekeeping as a form of protection,
honoring living and deceased family members, taking stock of one's
responsibility to the story, navigating competing agendas and versions
of family history. In particular, the articles highlight the
researcher--researched relationship. The authors summon a reconfiguring
of Michelle Fine's self-other hyphen (7) and Lucy Bailey's
genealogical hyphen - to include consideration of the researcher's
dual positioning in relation to the family stories and family
relationships they explore. Throughout, you will find authors
acknowledging their dual (or multiple) roles as researcher--daughter /
granddaughter / sibling / niece / cousin. Like the term
"family", each of these subject positions are variable and
context-informed.

Overview of the Articles

Alexandra Macht revisits her doctoral research on fathers to
reconsider her own father and her relationship with him whilst
researching fatherhood with a group of 47 Scottish and Romanian fathers.
She traces the interventions she both orchestrated and encountered that
address this seepage of the personal into the professional realm of
sociological research. She notes that "research can have
transformative effects on one's identity", when the researcher
/ writer adopts "an emotional and relational approach to the study
of family lives [wherein] connections to ones own family are brought up
and this has a broader transformative appeal". What I find both
hopeful and interesting about Macht's approach is that she
recognized the importance of honoring and respecting her relationship
with her father as she tells the story of how this relationship inserted
itself into her research about fathers and fathering and challenged and
stretched her capacity as a researcher.

In a similar vein of reconsidering one's research, Amanda
Carvalho Harris explores what she calls "the feeling process"
in the field of Narrative Inquiry. She too revisits her doctoral
research, wherein she engaged college students in a narrative approach
and notes that "methodology is more intricately rooted in the
personal than many of us ever think it should be." In her article,
she reconsiders a family story she had written about her grandmother for
a course taken during her own doctoral studies. She finds a way to ask
different questions that deepen her engagement with her family and
familial context. Here, again, is an article that negotiates between
interrogating and honouring a family member. Her efforts suggest that
the field of Narrative Inquiry could both benefit from and enhance
considerations of family methodology.

Prabha Jerrybandan explores family stories, the scant ones she has
and the ones she uncovers when she goes looking for more. Her
methodology is multifaceted as it entails being receptive to the stories
that are freely given, digging for more information when the stories
seem sparse and "listening in stereo" to casual conversations
in order to glean details of what she calls "an episodic
inheritance". She considers her responsibility to the stories she
uncovers and strives "for an integrity that holds true to the
original tellers." Jerrybandan also considers how her life
trajectory positions her as both an insider and an outsider to the
stories she finds and shares. Throughout her article she asks questions
about the ethicality of probing the scant stories she has inherited for
more information.

Junia Mason contemplates the material remnants of her elderly
aunt's life: newspaper clippings, personal effects, business
documents, photographs, school report cards" and ponders the
messages therein and the resonances with her own life and identity as a
black woman and artist, "finding [her] way in no less vulnerable
times." The quest for connection and meaning and the challenge of
deciding what to make public and what to keep private thread throughout
the article, reminding us of the dynamic relationship biographers must
have with their deceased subjects and the material effects that are kept
and interrogated.

Donna Sayman traces her journey researching her biological father.
Starting from a position of not knowing anything about him, she does a
DNA test and through genealogy services connects to her father's
family. While she does not use the term "blood memory" (9),
she discovers that her affinities to horses, horseback riding and
playing the banjo have deep and long histories with some of her paternal
relatives. These discoveries, as exciting and affirming as they are,
rest upon the backdrop of Sayman having inherited her mother's
lifelong insistence on privacy through silence. The search for her
father could only took place after her mother had died. The challenge
for Sayman is to separate her mother's silenced story (the
circumstances that led to her single-parenthood) from her own quest for
a story of her own (connecting with her paternal relations).

In the final article, Lucy Bailey takes a close look at the term
"narrative inheritance", the much-referenced concept from H.
L. Goodall, and applies a feminist lens to it. Starting with Donna
Haraway and Sara Ahmed, she considers the way in which narrative,
inheritance and family are dynamic terms / forces that are at play in
the terrain we are calling "family methodology". Working
against the investment in holistic narratives and conventional
definitions of "family," she ponders the concept of
inheritance, or, in playful feminist terms, "in*her*itance.
What's particularly generative about her work here, is that some of
her discussion probes the work of authors in this issue and the first
issue. Moving beyond the expected and the empirical, she emphasizes
choice, process, fragmentation, and resistance in the work of feminist
engagements with 'inheritances.'

The title of this editorial comes from Lucy's article. I chose
it because I love the way she engages with the work of others, not to
summarize and create fixities, but rather to invite scholars to think
about this idea we are calling 'family methodology' as
something that is generative, dynamic, and yes, even playful. We put
this second volume together because we had such a rich response to the
initial CFP that resulted in the first volume (10). We made that volume
available to the authors in this volume so that they might have the
opportunity to engage. As you read, you will encounter this engagement.
To me, it feels truly generative. We therefore anticipate that this
"new thread" of family methodology will find its way into
future issues of the journal.

I wish to thank the editor of Vitae Scholasticae - my co-editor and
colleague, Lucy Bailey, for her considerable talents and efforts to
bring this issue to fruition. For the past 2 years we have been working
closely on this project--but from a distance. I will dearly miss our
frequent ZOOM meetings and the minor roles our cats played in this
on-line exchange.

(5) "The 'sixties' scoop" is a term used to
acknowledge the widespread practice throughout Canada in the 1960s by
the state to remove Indigenous children from their families and put them
up for adoption by non-Indigenous Canadian couples.